A Statement on Ron Dellum's Mayoral Race

Considering Ron Dellums for Mayor: 4 Fundamental
Issues and Requirements.

A lot is being made of a potential Ron Dellums Oakland Mayoral run. Campaign Committees are actively being formed and a “Draft Ron Dellums!” publicity campaign has been launched by a group of progressives in the Oakland Post and other community newspapers and weekly’s. Given Ron Dellums broad name recognition and progressive credentials he could potentially win the Mayoral election by a landslide, but the question is, what could and would a Dellums Mayoral term amount to? What would his Mayoral term offer or enable for the
masses of New Afrikan and other oppressed and working people in Oakland?

The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) believes that one potential positive development of a Dellums campaign could be the formation of a broad progressive coalition and voting bloc. This bloc, as it stands, would of necessity be a “populist” formation, as it would in part be centered on a popular personality and a coalescence of short-term interests. Despite the weaknesses of populist formations and movements (i.e their capitulation to capital, petit bourgeois
domination, white supremacy, etc), this initiative would be a positive development if it would stimulate the various progressive candidates in the race to come together and combine their forces to not divide the progressive vote and give right wingers, like Ignacio De La Fuente, the opportunity to win the election in
2006. However, in order for this potential populist initiative to have any substantive meaning for the masses of oppressed and working people in Oakland it must address four fundamental issues.

1. Reversing the State Occupation and radically transforming the school district and education in Oakland.

The Dellum’s administration would have to take a clear progressive stand against the State Occupation of OUSD. This stand we believe must be premised on:
• Supporting the unions, students, parents, and community organizations in ending the state takeover.
• Demanding the immediate removal of the State Appointed Administrator.
• Demanding the immediate resumption of local control over OUSD.
• Demanding the immediate installation of a new School Board.
• Demanding the immediate cancellation of OUSD’s debts.
• Demanding that corporate Oakland, including the Port of Oakland, pay its share for public education in Oakland, including the elimination of the debt.

Furthermore, we believe this stand should include a vision wherein:
• New democratic governance structures are established to eliminate and transcend the inept School Board structure. We need real participatory democratic structures to serve the needs of our children and our communities.

• The teaching force reflects the national, ethnic, gender, and class diversity of Oakland, and the creation and implementation of a multinational
peoples-centered curriculum that reflects the aforementioned diversity.
• The complete elimination of corporate driven high stakes testing and the implementation of more authentic assessment measures.
• The repeal of Proposition 13 and the creation of a system of taxation that demands that corporations pay
their just share for public education and other public goods and services.
• The repeal of the destructive No Child Left Behind Act that aims to privatize education, starting with its repeal in Oakland.

To meet these demands and enact this vision the Dellums administration and the popular forces that support it must be willing to challenge the state government, various corporate interests, foundations like the Board Foundation (whose fundamental mission is to privatize public education), and unprincipled non-profits like the Bay Area Coalition of Equitable
Schools. To this end, we believe the Dellums campaign must build a strategic alliance with the “Take Back Our Schools Coalition”, which consists in part of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Organize the Bay (ODB) Coalition, ACORN, Xicano Moratorium Coalition, Education not Incarceration, Oakland Parents Together, the Oakland Federation of Teachers, Californias for Justice, the Million Worker March, CalCARE, Tojil, Bay Area Parent Leadership Action Network, American
Federated County State and Municipal Employees, and the Oakland Educators Association (see http://www.organizedabay.org or http://www.oaklandrising.com for more details).

2. Resisting and controlling the agenda of Developers and development in Oakland.

The Dellums administration would have to take a strong stance in resisting, controlling and ultimately curtailing the agenda of the Developers whom are currently dictating the agenda of Oakland’s politics. This includes taking on the likes of Shorenstein, Rick Holiday, and the consortium of interests planning on dispossessing the Eastlake/Laney community to for a
baseball stadium, and those working to sell off substantial parcels of OUSD and Merritt College.

It also means taking on the Port Authority, Walmart, and other corporate interests to ensure that their development projects contribute to the social development of Oakland, and that their enterprises are at minimum unionized and ecologically sustainable.

3. Stimulating sustainable economic development in Oakland, particularly creating jobs for New Afrikan youth.

We strongly believe that it would be imperative for a Dellums administration (or any progressive administration for that matter) to do everything within its power to implement the “Urban Environmental Accords” outlined in the United Nations Environment Program World Environmental Day Accords. More specifically, we believe that a Dellums administration
should seek to advance the basic aims and objectives of the “Reclaim the Future Project” (see http://www.ellabakercenter.org/page.php?pageid=233 for more information). We would demand of Dellums that New
Afrikan youth and youth from other oppressed nationalities (Xicanos, Latinos, Southeast Asians, and Pacific Islanders) be given first priority in all of the contracting, training, and employment directives of this Green initiative.

MXGM recognizes that the basic framework of the Urban Environmental Accords as it presently stands is in its essence reformist, meaning that its implementation will basically serve to strengthen the barbaric rule of capital. However, given the fundamental nature of the ecological crisis now confronting humanity, we feel that its implementation, if only on a local level, will be a major contribution towards initiating a substantive revolutionary transformation in our thinking and practice of ecologically and socially equitable and sustainable production, distribution, and circulation nationally and internationally.

4. Controlling the Police Department and creating a comprehensive recreational and skills training programs for youth.

The Dellums administration would have to buck against the reactionary owning class forces that seek to criminalize working class New Afrikans, Latinos and Southeast Asians and demand more police and more repression to solve the socio-economic crisis in Oakland. More Police and repression will not solve the crisis it will only aggravate it further. More specifically, the Dellums administration would have to take a concrete stance against the criminalization of New Afrikan and oppressed nationality youth that has characterized the Brown administration. This would entail the repeal of all of the reactionary loitering, curfew, sideshow, and eviction laws in Oakland. Its core policy initiatives however, we believe must entail the following:
• The implementation of a real Community Control or Oversight Board to direct the Oakland Police Department. This Board must be directly elected and have the ability to conduct independent investigations and to indict both officers and their supervisors for misconduct and non-social (i.e. criminal) offensives.
• Resisting the PATRIOT Act and other anti-terror directives from the Federal government through active and deliberate non-compliance. This entails refusing to engage in the immigrant registrations and raids, and the illegal monitoring, tracking, wiretaps and surveillance perpetrated by the Department of Homeland Security and other Federal entities.

Before a Dellums administration could implement this agenda his campaign would first have to endorse them. MXGM believes that progressives and radicals must make our endorsement of his campaign conditional on the adoption of these (and other) program, policy and agenda items. However, the progressive and radical forces in Oakland must be clear that even if Dellums agrees and adheres to these points as an individual, he and his administration will be powerless to implement them if there is no mass movement to give them strength and meaning. Likewise, should he and his administration deny or betray these interests, it will and must be the organized strength of the mass progressive movement that must force him and his administration to adhere to this agenda and its demands. Ultimately the progressive forces must organize themselves into a coherent force and movement, and it must be this force that must exercise power in its own name and interests when all is said and done. Ron Dellums and his popular progressive candidacy can and might be a catalyst for stimulating this initiative in Oakland, but ultimately it is not something he as an individual will lead or control, that is something we must do for ourselves.

International Reflections and Lessons
“I say this very deliberately, not even those of us who stand on this platform can tell you that the remedy in Guyana is that a new set of people must take over from the old set of people and we will run the system better. That is no solution to the problems of Guyana. The problem is much more fundamental than that. We are saying that working class people will get
justice only when they seize the initiative, when the mold themselves together. No body else can give it (liberation) to them as a gift. Someone who comes claiming to be a liberator is either deluding himself or trying to delude the people. He either doesn’t understand the process of real life, or he is trying to suggest that you do not understand it. And so long as we suffer from a warped concept of politics as being leadership, we are going to be in a lot of trouble.” – Walter Rodney, Guyanese Revolutionary Intellectual assassinated in 1980, taken from the film “the Sky’s Wild Noise”.